Claude plan or API: which costs less?
What your month of coding with Claude would cost on the API, next to the Claude plan prices.
Result
On the API, 4 feature sessions a day for 20 days on Claude Opus 5.5 would cost about $1,728 a month at list prices, or $415 with prompt caching. Claude plans a month: Pro $20, Max from $100, Team Standard (per seat) $25.
| Model | List prices | With 90% cache reads |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic | $1,728 | $415 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic | $864 | $207 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic | $43.20 | $12.10 |
| Claude Fable 5.1Anthropic | $4,320 | $950 |
How we work it out
We count each feature session as 60 calls of 80K prompt and 2K output tokens and price them at the API list price of 4 Claude models. Claude plans: Pro: $20 a month; Max: from $100 a month; Team Standard (per seat): $25 a month[1]. Plans have usage limits that are not published as token counts, so a plan can run out before the API numbers here suggest.
Questions
Does this tell me if my work fits in a plan?
No. Claude plans have usage limits that Anthropic does not publish as token counts, so we can only show what the same tokens would cost on the API.
What is a feature session?
Our own yardstick: 60 model calls of about 80K prompt tokens and 2K output tokens each, like an hour of a coding agent building one feature.
What if one plan's limit isn't enough?
Shuriken's hot swapping moves your chats to another of your accounts or API keys when one nears its limit, so the work keeps going. Use only accounts you own and are entitled to use.
More tools
- Compare AI modelsEvery pair, side by side
- AI token cost calculatorWhat your tokens cost on every model
- Context window calculatorWill my code fit in the context window?
- Prompt caching calculatorHow much prompt caching saves you
- Free limit reset trackerIs a free Claude or Codex reset live right now?
- Claude usage limit trackerDid the 5-hour or weekly limit go up or down?
- Claude Code usage dashboardYour tokens, models, cost and busiest hours, from one command
Sources
- claude.com: pricing, read
Numbers from the makers' own pages, checked by hand, last read . List prices in US dollars before tax. Spotted a mistake? office@shuriken.sh.
Made by Shuriken, the harness for coding agents. Its hot swapping moves your chats to another of your accounts or API keys when one nears its limit. Use only accounts you own and are entitled to use.
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